Collected Short Fiction, page 395
Gravitation thrust in a vicious twist through the Fault. The oceans and frigid air leaped in weird convulsions. The uneasy planet quivered—until the frightful blizzards whipped down. Tidal waves rolled far inland, and froze to plains of ice. The Earth shook, and volcanic fire luridly lit the night.
Not even one quarter the world’s savagely battered, terrified survivors were moved safely below. Even those who reached the refuges were decimated when the sea broke with fearful force through the shuddering rocks. Then quake and eruption slashed their pitiful numbers still further.
But the race lived, for children were born in the refuges.
Markham Drake was magnificently ushered into a spotless hospital room in New Chicago. Gay Ferrand was born in the narrow little sick-bay at the Outside Station. Jeremy Cord strangled down his first breath in the smoke-filled cab of a mole, far out beneath the Atlantic.
Alarming news came from the miners who had covered Cord’s precious claim with a roof against the outer cold, and thus protected had sifted every grain of monazite from the crater. The deposit was completely exhausted!
By then, Leland Drake was First Regent of the twelve who had taken the rule of the refuges from the old Emergency Council. He announced that the power isotope would be rationed to last out the thirty years it should take for the Blot to pass. There was no reason for panic.
But Paul Ferrand was visibly stunned by the news, though he never revealed the cause of his fear, even to Leland Drake, who once braved the Station to question him.
The tall engineer was leaner, now, even more stooped. But his cragged face reflected the stern power that ruled the refuges. The impact of his hollow eyes was dynamic as ever.
“You’ve found something, Paul.” It was a statement, not a question. “Something important—and frightening. What is it?
SITTING at a paper-scattered desk in his laboratory beneath the insulated dome, Paul Ferrand nodded his dark head solemnly.
“I’m working on a problem,” he admitted. “And I’m afraid.” He sighed wearily. Suddenly the bright-lit room seemed cold to Drake, so cola with the deadly rigor of the frozen world without, that he shuddered. Ferrand shook his head. “Perhaps I’m wrong. I pray God that I am!”
“Wrong about what?” demanded Drake. “I’d rather not tell you, Leland,” the astronomer said soberly. “You are already doing all that can be done. It wouldn’t help you any to know what I fear. Perhaps I’m wrong. Just let me stay here. Send me the assistants and equipment I need. When I find out whether I’m right. I’ll tell you.”
And Drake learned nothing more.
Ferrand remained at the Station, keeping secret the fear haunted him, the fear that grayed and lined his face. It whitened his hair, shrank his flesh, sharpened his eyes, and ruthlessly drove him to endless, sleepless effort. Even his beloved wife’s death did not break his vigil.
At last he went out of the Station, with a machine his assistants knew as a “snow-sled,” and did not come back. The search for his body failed. And the Station itself was wrecked by meteor and quake, again and again. It had stood abandoned for two years when Jeremy Cord volunteered to repair it.
The phrase of hope, “when the Sun comes back,” was the very life of the world in which Jeremy Cord grew up. A world of narrow, unending tunnels, walled with hard gray durite. A stern, efficient world, whose existence was the hum of machines, the whir of ventilator fans, the reactions in chemical vats. A world whose grim humor consisted mostly of a thousand jokes about eating crow.
It was a world whose children found little space for play, few green things or animals, no wind, sky or Sun. The only light came from glowing tubes, and the only time was marked by clocks.
The people of that world lived in narrow durite cells, crowded as only prisoners and tenement dwellers once had been. They toiled without end to earn their meager rations of CRO, and submitted to a harsh dictatorship of necessity. The world below was cruel and drab. It would have been completely intolerable, but for those words of hope:
When the Sun comes back!
YOUNG Jeremy Cord was not quite six, when his father was lost. The Atlantic tube was finished. Limping little Morley Cord was still a grease-monkey on the moles. At first, in recognition of his gift of the monazite, Drake had made him Regent of Propaganda. But the democratic little newshawk quarreled with Drake’s scientific dictatorship, and the dictatorship defeated him. Cord found too much solace for the defeat in liquid crow to hold a better job.
He was on a mole boring south beneath Patagonia. The quest for another deposit of the precious isotope, Drake had ordered, must never stop.
A terrific explosion shattered the durite wall behind the machine, forming a barrier that the rescue crews failed to pierce. The mole and the bodies were never discovered, nor the cause of the explosion ever learned.
“If a subspace failed.” muttered Drake, “the solar element in the converter might explode as violently as that. Morley must have got liquid crow in his grease!”
Drake let Jeremy’s mother come back to her old secretarial position. It was in the First Regent’s household that Jeremy came to know Mark, and fell in love with sweetfaced little Gay Ferrand.
Jeremy was just seven on the day he told Gay that he was going to marry her, “after the Sun comes back.” The little girl shook her dark head.
“I can’t marry you, Jerry.”
“Don’t you want to?” he demanded. “I’ll always love you, and never drink crow, or make you cry.”
“I want to, Jerry,” she whispered softly, and put a warm little arm around him. “But I’ve got to marry Mark. You see, Daddy, Doc and Mother planned it, before she was killed.” Tears gleamed in her sober eyes.
Childishly, Jeremy accepted that as fixed.
It was on another birthday, when he was sixteen, that he told his mother he had a job as “grease-monkey” on a mole. Remembering how Morley Cord was lost, she bitterly protested.
“Maybe it’s dangerous, Mom,” he admitted. “But don’t you see?” His voice was eager. “It’ll mean always exploring into new mineral veins, and caves nobody has ever seen. Just think, Mom. I might find another deposit of the power monazite!”
HIS mother shook her head. “There’s probably no more on Earth,” she said. “The other fell in a meteor, you know. And no trace of the isotope has been found anywhere else.”
Jeremy’s chin lifted stubbornly.
“But, Mom, if I could!” His blue eyes went tender. “Mom, your hands are always cold. You’re too thin, because the rations that can go around now aren’t enough to live on.” His arm slipped around her. “What does danger matter, against that? Every man has to do his share.”
His mother’s eyes were glittering with tears, but her sallow, sunken face managed to smile.
“Jerry,” she asked softly, “isn’t there something—someone—else?”
Jeremy ground his toe on the durite floor. “You mean Gay?”
“You love her, don’t you, Jerry?”
“I do, Mom!” His arm went tense around her thin shoulders. “But Mark does, too.” His voice rushed on swiftly. “We’re friends. But Mark has everything, and I have nothing. Gay likes us both. She probably will marry Mark. That has always been planned. But if I could find a vein of the isotope—” His foot twisted against the floor again. His mother made no further objection, and he went to work on the moles.
Six more years passed, until that dark time when he looked through the meteor-torn window in the dome of the Outside Station, and saw that the Sun had not come back.
A staggering blow? It was defeat for all of mankind!
For a long time he stood beside the frozen, bodiless hand that clutched a dead, unfinished cigarette. Gazing into the dead-black mystery of the Blot, he felt the cold of the Outside creep into the pressure suit, stiffen his limbs. Crystals of frost began to form inside the lenses of his helmet. His staring eyes turned them into faces—the faces of his mother and Gay Ferrand, then all the faces he knew. And they were all turning stiffly gray with cold, want and death, because the Sun had not come back. . . .
THE black cold of the Blot pervaded all his mind. Was this the doom that Ferrand had foreseen? Had the lost scientist discovered that Earth would be swept along with the Blot, never to emerge? Was that the secret of his long self-exile, his desperate research, his mysterious death?
“I’ll find out,” Jeremy promised himself. Lights came on, startlingly, in the dome’s silent vacuum. The tube-man had started the auxiliary converter. Jeremy broke from the paralysis of dread that had gripped him. He set about patching the hole. He used materials from the repair cabinet that the Station’s unfortunate crew had had no time to reach.
The patch was welded on. Heater coils glowed, and air sighed from the ventilators. Above the dome, the beacon glowed once more, burning in a single brilliant spot high over the white, undulating desert of frozen air.
Jeremy telephoned to Mark Drake:
“We have reached and repaired the Station. The Blot has not passed.”
Jeremy felt Mark’s stunned disappointment, even over the wire.
“So, there is no Sun?” But Mark Drake was not easily crushed. In a moment his voice was brusque and confident again. “Good work, Jerry. I will announce that you have simply failed to reach the Station as yet. The truth would only cause a needless panic.”
Jeremy felt his same old admiration for Mark’s reckless confidence.
“What are my orders, now?”
“Maintain the Station,” Mark replied without hesitation. “Continue observing for any sign that the Blot might be passing. Make every effort to find out what Ferrand was working on, and what happened to him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All our lives may depend on you, Jerry!”
CHAPTER IV
Earth Adrift!
JEREMY helped remove the solidly frozen remains of the man who had died in Ferrand’s laboratory. That gruesome task done, he plunged into the thousands of pages of notes and data that the lost scientist had left behind.
He knew the task would not be easy. For ten years, able men had been trying to solve the riddle. Even Leland Drake had studied photostatic copies of all these pages.
A glimpse of the first note-book, where the dead man had left it open, filled Jeremy with new discouragement. With his usual strange secretiveness, Ferrand had used a cipher. All those symbols represented quantities that no other mind had ever grasped.
Grimly, Jeremy drove himself to the task. He had Gay’s hint. Her father’s “snow-sled” had in reality been a “sky-sled,” in which he must have ventured off the Earth and into the very heart of the Blot’s mystery. He also had the bewildered comments of previous investigators, and here and there, through the pages, he found other hints.
At last he thought he glimpsed the outline of the problem. He set out to solve it independently—and found that his independent solution also solved the cipher!
Week after dreary, exhausting week went by. Despite electric radiators, the Station seemed perpetually cold. White crystalline frost grew tenaciously on all the walls, ports and even the radiators. Every lurking shadow carried its sinister reminder of the dark Outside. The brooding silence bore the ever-present menacing weight of impending death.
“It’s nearly two months that we’ve been watching the instruments and the Blot,” grumbled his wheel-man. “And not a ray of light. The cold and the dark and all that stillness are enough to drive anybody mad!”
“And things are going along damned badly back in the refuges,” added the tube-man. “My wife telephoned this morning. They’ve cut down on the heat and food again. The people are whispering that we’ve finally reached the Station, and didn’t find the Sun. She wanted to know, but the operator cut us off. Mark Drake has ordered no more phoning. There’s trouble brewing, sir. They’re going to have a full-size panic on their hands!”
Jeremy worked ahead. Every foreshadowing of the disaster that threatened made his task more important.
At last came the moment when he knew that all the parts of the riddle had suddenly slipped into place. One instant told him all that Ferrand had feared.
Jeremy dropped his face into his hands, shuddering at the awful finality of the doom that must come. . . .
O wonder Paul Ferrand had lived and died a horror-haunted recluse! Jeremy saw the reason, now, for the terrible exile. He guessed the strange fate to which that dreadful intuition had driven Ferrand.
For a long time he sat in the silent laboratory, stunned to the point of apathy. The cold of the bitter Outside gnawed deep into him. His body stiffened, cramped. At last he forced himself to rise.
It wouldn’t do merely to guess. The unproved fear was too shattering. Ferrand had been wise not to speak. And Jeremy himself must not, until he had made the test that killed Ferrand. For the fear itself—even if it had no base—might destroy mankind.
He called his men from their vigil in the dome. “I believe that I’ve discovered what Ferrand was afraid of,” he told them. “There is only one way to find whether the danger is real. Somebody must go out through the Blot, the way Ferrand did. And that’s just what I’m going to do.”
“But how?” demanded Parker, the wheelman.
“In the mole,” Jeremy stated calmly.
“The mole?”
“After we have equipped it with an invention of Ferrand’s,” Jeremy explained. “It already has an insulated hull, and most of the self-contained equipment that a space ship requires. I have deciphered the specifications of the neutron-blast reaction tube that Ferrand invented to drive his own sky-sled. All the materials are here to build another.”
Parker and Kruger, the tube-man, were skilled mechanics. Within a week the shining new repulsion tube had been completed and installed in the mole. When it was done, Parker squared his shoulders.
“I’m going with you,” he declared.
The others also volunteered, but Jeremy shook his blond head.
“Sorry, boys.” He grinned and shook their hands. “Thanks. But the reactor and the new transformers for it take up most of the room. Just put on your suits and wall up the hole where I dig out.”
Parker clung to his hand.
“You’ll never come back!” he cried.
“If Ferrand was right,” Jeremy said, “perhaps it won’t make much difference whether I get back or not. But I will—if I can.”
The oscillators of the great ME-converter purred like some mighty cat. Jeremy waited for his grimy comrades to retreat behind a bulkhead, into the elevator shaft. Then the mole shuddered on its caterpillar tracks. The wheel spun, and durite teeth cut screaming into living rock.
The machine made a new tunnel, sloping sharply upward. It cut through frozen soil, ice, snow, then a powdery drift of frozen air. It emerged into the unrelieved black night that had ruled the planet for three decades.
Was that night eternal?
The Station’s low dome peered almost apprehensively over the wastes of changeless white. The dark round ports were like frightened eyes. The beacon light burned unrestingly above, gleaming high over the unbroken snow.
Jeremy started the neutron-blast reactor. The great metal tube roared out a deep bellowing scream. Phosphorescent gas swirled up from the drifts behind the machine. Jeremy inched open the power. The scream climbed rapidly up the scale. It became a head-splitting shriek. Suddenly it was silent, beyond audibility.
The mole slid forward, plunged through a feathery drift. It lifted spaceward! Behind, the beacon blinked slowly, beseechingly, on a dial of white. The beacon light, to which Ferrand had never returned, flashed red and green, green and red.
Elsewhere, there was only darkness.
The mole drove away from Earth. The light dwindled behind, became a tiny star. Its colors shifted, through the Fault’s weird distortion. Sometimes the green turned blue, the red faded into yellow.
Hours passed. A black curtain hid the Station. Growing cold and weary, lulled by the hypnotic purring of the converter, Jeremy wondered vaguely if he could ever find it again.
Abruptly he roused, tensed beyond endurance.
There was light ahead!
Jeremy caught his breath. Elation shook him. Those stars, twisted though they were into streaks and insanely spinning spirals, were the first that men had seen in thirty years.
AHEAD, the constellations gathered swiftly into the familiar patterns he had learned. He was emerging from the Blot! Save for a wavering zone about a cloud of darkness northward, the sky was luminous, serene.
The Earth, he saw, was merely clutched in a trailing streamer of the Blot. A few weeks more and it would be free!
But the haunting fear of many weeks clung to Jeremy, and that was what drowned his elation.
He was searching, without real hope, for the Sun. And it was gone.
There was no mighty flame-winged orb, such as had sustained the planet’s life through all the ages. Nor could he find any of the familiar planets that had formed the Sun’s family. Dull with the weary apathy of too much dread, he searched the constellations for confirmation of Ferrand’s secret fear. Among the faint stars of the constellation, Hercules, he discovered a new golden point of novalike splendor, unmarked on his star-charts. That, he knew, must be the Sun, forever severed from all its family of planets!
Still, he knew, it must be receding at its constant speed of twenty miles, every second. A few more decades, and it would be hard even to see. Then it would be just one more inconsequential cosmic atom. Earth was now an orphaned planet, alone in space—adrift!
Defeated, Jeremy turned the flying mole back toward the wavering patch of darkness, seeking the isolated Earth. It was fateful news he carried. Eternal night had fallen. There would be no dawn.
Suspended in the velvet void, veiled with white nebular dust, the stars were sharply defined as diamond points. The lost Sun was but a yellow mote among them. Earth’s sister planets? They were now scattered electrons, Jeremy knew, flung off like water-drops from a spinning wheel, to die in the absolute zero of sunless space.
